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Scary fairies and other melodramatic assumptions about the generation gap

By Jane Rankin-Reid - posted Monday, 12 December 2005


Compared with our long-suffering, depression-enduring, world war fighting, nation-building parents, we baby boomers have had it all and then some. And yet we’re still whining about youth culture as though the next generation’s primary obligation is to make sense to us - the adult adults - its least important target audience.

Is it time we let go of our self-affirming insistence upon access equalling awareness as the only path to accepting the differences between ourselves and younger people of today? Is our anxiety about the natural disconnection between ourselves and under 25s based on ideological vanities and our generation’s self perceptions as being the coolest most understanding, tolerant and culturally expansive of all?

In a recent article in The Times, Turner Prize winning contemporary artist Grayson Perry observes that:

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Few groups can be more conservative than teenagers who take coolness seriously: they pounce on difference; goodness is boiled down to the lowest common denominator of “correct” brands, bands and overwrought hair. What makes cool an immature value system is its simple hip/square, in/out, mingin’/blingin’ binary, while being adult is dealing with shades of grey and with compromise. With luck, as we mature we can trust our judgment about what feels good or bad. We can cast aside the crutches of cool.

A happily married motorcycle-riding transvestite father whose decorated ceramic spells have long set middle England and the contemporary art establishment’s teeth on edge, Perry is unusually wise to the social hypocrisies and moral inconsistencies youngsters face in today’s world.

My generation has grown up steeped in the argot of cool. There are many people of my age who still seem to think that the value system of a teenage boy applies to grown-up life. Perhaps it’s time to chuck the Pete Doherty trilby and take the surf-shack sticker off the back of your car, for cool is the new straight.

Bad news for boomer adults who’d thought that because we’ve stayed cool and in touch, we’d seen the last of generation gaps. Is it time instead to face the fact that we are the most selfish parental figures ever to crawl the face of the earth? We’ve spent years instilling naïvely assembled visions of selectively acquired cultural flexibility into our kids’ minds. Meanwhile, they’ve been captive audiences for our delayed developments, life-gripping identity crises, divorces, re-partnerings, ideological gratification and pursuits for livelihoods that keep us feeling young, fit, looking good and ethically on message, at least when decent retirement funds are provided.

Cast against a muddy landscape of headlining, political and corporate malfeasance and yes, Encarta-enabled Australian under 25s’ melodramatic pessimism may seem churlish compared with our ironically convenient cynicism. Enforced familiarity with boomers’ historical conduct as authority figures is bound to expose canyons of difference between the two generations.

As a parent says:

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This generation isn’t going to produce many social workers! They care empathetically rather than conscientiously, they have much less active social consciences than when we were their age. They’re often aggressively apolitical, amazingly talented, but not particularly humanist in their stated concerns. It’s a very different global and social landscape from ours three decades ago. Comparisons between cultures and experience are simply not as vividly urgent and as confusing as that may be from our value perspectives, it would be naïve for us to expect anything else.

Nonetheless, parents are bewildered, mainstream media is frustrated, but from young people’s perspective, consumer markets often provide the most flexible stagings for the transient manifests of youth.

For us, not trusting anyone over 30 was tantamount to securing the space for our own say. Young people today are far more likely to challenge the “messenger” rather than the “the message” in the way we did.

We boomers do have a fairly insistent way of bringing it all back to ourselves at moments like these, don’t we? Teenage identity in media emerged clumsily from a relatively monochromatic outlook three decades ago, rarely capturing our luxurious experimentation, inherent suspicion of consumerism, relentless reinvention and self expression, as it amplified into our life choices.

Whereas today’s young people manoeuvre deftly through price-pointed marketplaces’ generic externalisation of their (retail) distinctiveness. So we don’t get kids’ tastes in music, sexualised antithetical sartorial codification of celibacy, tattoos, tummy baring tops and crack yielding bottoms, body piercings, hysterical makeup and cheesy hair. But they’re a generation far less likely to be making personal market choices to state their differences to us, than among their peers. It’s not always about us after all.

“They’re not the ‘don’t have’ generation, says one mother, “they’re the ‘don’t want’ generation …”

There’s another worrisome subtext in presuming that today’s younger generation are driving our society into what may actually be an historically inevitable homogenisation of (traditional views of) national identity. Australians collectively of all ages forget the words to our national anthem. For children, it’s a duff hymn devoid of meaningful sentiment. To me, homogenisation anxieties imply lost or misperceived market opportunities, especially when it comes to young adults’ disengagement with mainstream media.

In his essay (On Line Opinion October 25, 2005) on the consequences of conglomerate media ownership, independent publisher Eric Beecher notes that today’s youngsters aren’t tracking favorably for the future of conventional media.

Relatively few people, especially those under the age of 40, care about the subjects that matter to serious journalists. As a result, they regard traditional high-end media as increasingly irrelevant to their lives and interests …

He’s right and he’s also dead wrong in simply delineating disinterest in “serious” treatment of issues as a generationally segmented problem. But he’s not alone in his thinking. Mainstream newspaper publishers have been wresting with falling readerships and generational market shifts for at least a decade, with little apparent success. So it must be fairly galling for younger readers to learn that rather than it being time for some variety - after hearing the same thing from serious commentators, mainly about themselves - for most of their working lives, in relation to the big issues of today, they, the new target audience are accused of not caring about the world.

As Thomas Zengotita said in “Why We Are What We Are; review of Mediated: The Hidden Effects of the Media on You and Your World” (The Guardian, July 24, 2005):

Take the supposed political apathy of the young. If for years on end, they’re sifting mediated options, deciding who they are or want to be, is there any wonder that politics, using pop video techniques and pop slogans inferior to the pitch on cans of Diet Cola, is the option they never find time for, one limp message among many compulsive ones. It isn’t the spin that turns them off; it’s the style and the tone of voice. It’s Clinton and Bush and Tony Blair, acting again, because acting is what they all have to do while the media carousel turns.

The young people I’ve interviewed for this story see “serious journalism” as code for ideological tenure and labour market stability rather than a challenge worth undertaking. But media commentators have been trapped into analysing young adults as a dysfunctional market quotient, rather than as a significant area of our cultural mainstream with whom current presentations of “serious issues” are literally failing to engage.

It’s a relatively narrow interpretation of 21st century individuals’ experience of media from this perspective. And it should not translate into assumptions that young people don’t care, so much as there is a radical difference in how they express that care and how they source content in relation to their concerns. Are younger readers sidelining assumptions of seniority as an established imprimatur of “quality of conscience”? If this is true, the news has been greeted disdainfully, conflating the integrity of young adults’ stated concerns with their selection of information sources. Another moral inconsistency highlighting our generation’s inexperienced mistrust of the pace of widening choices.

Is the sudden revelation of the uncommon ground between parents and young people today really so surprising? My perceptions are as a non-parent - albeit someone deeply concerned with the concept of societal “care” - as childhoods are transformed into menacing syndromatic “disorders”, frequently mistaking our society’s impatient time -deprived outlook with the enduring realities of childhood needs.

Lately children in my extended family circle have remembered dreading clowns and adult fairies dressed in wings and layers of pink princess tulle, lending themselves in lieu of all that’s not possible when motherhood is unattained. Female columnists’ parse heartfelt reports on how children foresworn or has made it all the better for other people’s. Few comment on childcare shortages unless trumpeting their own exultant babysitting skills, even less on mothers’ health, unless comparing personal symptoms. Indeed as we boomers grow older, legions of childless and “time disabled” parents have paradoxically reconfigured a progressively limited undertaking of “care”, into a material catalogue of unconditional tenderness, especially useful for deal-making at bedtime.

Parents interviewed for this story occasionally envy my child-free status. Exhausted, they’re also disappointed that children conceived or acquired to affect unsuccessful marriages haven’t solved the original problems. Though they love them desperately, their children take them for granted, and are disrespectful and often hard to control. Others are hell bent on reintroducing or inventing familial tradition as a survival skill, instilling godliness and correct table manners in the very young to paper over cracks in unhappy relationships and extensive absences from home.

Both tribes of children use the “dysfunctional” word like hip-hair product brands. Time is the loaded weapon on both sides of the generational divide, of less than zero concern for many youngsters whose idea of “the moment” is entertainment, connection and materiality, driving parents into a spleenic frenzies. But equally, our preoccupation with the value of time in our own lives has radically reconfigured the act of pausing sufficiently for young people’s time-based needs. This spectacularly inconvenient disparity is paramount to reconsidering how young people are likely to perceive our generation’s value systems.

Suddenly, the anger between the two generations has become practically institutionalised as young people’s eyes glaze at questions about Britney, Delia, Eminem and Foo Fighters by people who still dance to Michael Jackson CDs when they’re pissed. Duh! It's boring being accused of not caring about global issues and told constantly you’re just like us at that age.

We caring-sharing boomer adults think we’ve been allotted rights to exist in harmony with them because of the sensitivity of our experience when, let’s face it, theirs is a parallel universe and we really don’t belong there. An awkward nexus highlighting the spiritual disjunction between social ideals and parental responsibility, as in the nature of controlling our children's fates in a dangerous world that we’ve too busy to share with them.

This confusion, of awareness as a value system with empathy as a life skill prompts another question. What about Mark Latham and all the other schedule-deprived parents whose dashed dreams and truths denied are - disclaimer disclaimer - all “for the sake of the children? How should children evaluate parental duty expressed in such dismally argued instances of “time” materialised as career sacrifices?

Still, it could all be a hell of a lot worse. With no children of my own, I’m nonetheless endlessly interested in other people's, albeit from a certain distance. Many of my friends and family have marvellous children, a dozen or so now in their mid-to-late teens. Physically and intellectually, these young people inspire much that compelled friendship with their parents at the same age. But their parents mortify them. We trade embarrassing stories. They groan and roll their eyes; everybody’s PARENTS should ALL be KILLED always.

Indeed, Henry, Louis, Alice, Tully, Nina, Lili, Jimmy, Bruno, Caspar, Eden, Lola, Tom and Harry are in varying universal stages of the same hormonal call to arms our parents heard from behind our slammed bedroom doors. Accident prone rebels, street angels and dining room devils prancing oblique pop nuances, slouching, breaking curfews and controlled substance prohibitions, scoring high marks one term, threats of expulsion the next.

And painfully for their parents, they’re ungrateful for all they demand and are given. Revealing, tender, needy, inspired, tough as glass, beautiful, vulnerable, selfish, changeable, remote, revelatory, capricious, prone to surprising bouts of generosity or redemptive acts of alarming goodness, they’re just children and well, what did we expect?

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About the Author

Jane Rankin-Reid is a former Mercury Sunday Tasmanian columnist, now a Principal Correspondent at Tehelka, India. Her most recent public appearance was with the Hobart Shouting Choir roaring the Australian national anthem at the Hobart Comedy Festival's gala evening at the Theatre Royal.

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